Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Inking Jim Smith

I'm Jim 's biggest fan. He has a way of drawing funny and solid at the same time.I have tons of his rough sketches and caricatures and thought I would attempt cleaning one up in illustrator.It's very tricky trying to pick just the right lines to make thick and thin. I try to make every line mean something, not just float around inside the silhouette of the forms.

So for each line I ink, I look for the other corresponding line that describes a form between them.

It ain't perfect but it's fun to do. I think I lost some of the triangular shape of Duke's head.

If anyone is interested in practicing their clean ups, I could put more of Jim's drawings up.

We are doing a job together now and maybe we could use another clean up artist for him.

Let me know if you wanna buy any of his art too, because he has some for sale. It's genius.

I like how you switched to lighter grey, brown and purple for the inside lines. It Really helps the thickest black lines on the outside stand out the most, while still getting away with luscious thick lines inside.

I gave her a go. That is one manly goddamn neck. I'm still a little green with a stylus. I am starting to get the hang of how to juggle layers, but I still have to hit the 'undo' button a lot to correct screw-ups. This took me about 2 hours, but I'm learning and getting faster with this rig. I used Corel Paint and Mypaint. Corel has better brushes, but Mypaint has a more intuitive interface.

Hi John, me again, I have a question.When you put color lines, how do you know which color should have each line? Do you vary the color of the lines during the painting process? Is there some trick to this?